[Coco] Virtual Memory in OS-9

[William Schaub]

I am looking into possibly working with OS-9 on both the coco2 and the 
new coco3 when it arrives from cloud9. I know I should hunt down the 
manuals, but I'm not 100% sure where to look. I just wanted to ask if 
the operating system has calls for allocating more memory to a process, 
or if everything has to have memory allocated statically.

Also I really want to know if it's possible to execute programs that use 
more memory than is physically installed by paging to mass storage of 
some sort.
 It would be very nice if something similar to the UNIX mmap() system 
call is available.

I plan on starting out with the OS-9 C compiler as it looks like it has 
a lot of UNIX compat stuff in it. I would like to see just how much of a 
UNIX like environment I could re-create on OS-9

I saw a lot of unix tool ports on the rtsi archive so it cant be too 
bad.  But I'm wondering if theres a way to make curses apps run on OS-9 
does the OS-9 console emulate any particular type of terminal? (one that 
implements escapes for character attributes, cursor movement and such) 
at the worst I could always hang a real terminal off of an RS232 port.

I would like to see just how far I can go with both OS-9 Level 1 and 2 
(most likely NitrOS-9)
one of the ideas being a sockets library for OS-9 that talks over a 
serial line to a PC and gives access to the sockets library of the 
connected PC plus some UNIX network tools that get linked to that library.

But knowing very little about OS-9 and so far not knowing where to find 
the manuals (Particularly the Level 1 manuals) I'm not sure if any of 
this is even possible.

I also plan to learn 6809 assembly and how to interface directly with 
hardware, but I figured C would be a good first step. If everything 
works out nicely I do plan to put together a nice virtual hard drive 
image with a full development system + UNIX tools etc.

I hope I'm not being a pest with this post Ive spent most of my time on 
UNIX and grew up with the coco2 being the first computer I got when I 
was 5, and the machine that got me into computers in the first place. so 
now 20 years later I dusted my old coco off and figured I could still 
put it to use to teach me about things I never got around to learning, 
like assembly language and interfacing to hardware directly, writing 
drivers etc. since its a simple system that is well documented I could 
learn a lot of fundamental concepts quickly at least thats my thinking.  
I can't imagine trying to do this on modern PC hardware which is many 
times more complex and aside from the really standard chips not that 
well documented at all unless you sign an NDA.